Top 3 Myths About Genital Warts

According to people who collect medical statistics, Genital Warts are among the commonest sexually transmitted afflictions. Indeed, if people were to be brutally honest about the state of their health – including the inconvenient details – it would emerge that perhaps a considerable majority of them have suffered from Genital Warts at some point in their lives!
What is more worrying though, besides the commonness of Genital Warts, is the number of misconceptions people have about the condition. And while the adage that ‘ignorance is bliss’ might apply in other areas of life, it certainly does not apply with regard to health, where holding the wrong idea about an illness could see you fail to seek treatment for what turns out to be a very serious medical condition, or seek the wrong type of treatment for it, naturally with grave consequences to you in the future.
One of the commonest myths about genital warts – perhaps arising out of the fact that the condition is classified among the sexually transmitted diseases – is that you can only get it as a result of a sexual encounter. The true position, however, is that while the primary mode of genital warts transmission is unprotected sexual contact, you can still get the condition from non sexual skin contact with a person suffering from the condition. This means that if your partner in marriage, for instance, happens to get genital warts, it doesn’t necessary mean that they have been ‘wandering’ as there are other ways through which you could get infected with the condition. In fact, it has been observed that the virus responsible for causing genital warts can survive outside the human body for considerable periods of time, so that sharing things like bathroom equipment (say towels) could still cause the transmission of the virus, even without sexual contact between the people sharing the said equipment.
The second – and potentially grave- myth held about genital wart is that ‘it is a women’s disease’ and that it can never afflict men. Nothing could be further from the truth. The chances of a man getting infect with genital wart are in fact almost as high as the chances of a woman getting afflicted with the same condition, only that the female manifestation of the condition tends to be more outwardly visible. Now this myth is described as potentially ‘grave’ because a man holding it who happens to fall into genital wart’ way could find himself not seeking medical attention for the condition, or seeking medical condition for the wrong illness (since doctors tend – in most cases – to treat just what they are told); leading to a situation where the worst effects of the disease get to manifest.
The third commonest – and pessimistic, we may say – myth held about genital wart is that it never heals. And while there might be some truth in the idea that genital wart can be chronic in some cases (since there is no cure for the HPV virus that causes it), the true position is that the body’s natural illness-fighting mechanisms (even without the help of any medication) can often find ways of combating the effects of the virus, perhaps pushing it underground, so that the frequency of incidences goes down gradually to a point where genital warts can be said to have been virtually wiped out, though the virus remains in the body.